Posts Tagged ‘5 Star’

I haven’t posted anything about the Sims in a while, simply because I’d grown a bit bored of Ambitions and had accidentally deleted my many accomplished Sims when reformatting my computer a few months back, and hadn’t felt up to doing everything all over again!

I had been looking forward to the release of the Sims 3 Late Night, which is basically the new updated version of the Sims Night Life. I’m a bit vampire crazy (not so much for the sparkly kind, but I do enjoy even them) and Vampires were finally being added to the game in the Late Night expansion! I got the expansion installed Sunday afternoon, and have been doing little else since then, lol.

My first step was to move one of my characters into the new town. At first I was really excited to find out that you can actually live in skyscrapers! I moved my Sim into a little apartment with a nice view of the city, planning to one day kick out my neighbors and expand my tiny place. Unfortunately I found out that isn’t possible. Unless they release some way to edit skyscraper floors and apartments outside of the game, there is no way to change anything but the inner walls of where you live. The other units in the skyscrapers don’t actually exist, they are just black holes that NPSims disappear into when they aren’t out on the town. I guess that’s the only way they could have the skyscrapers without the game becoming a lagfest!

My next Late Night adventure was to meet myself a Vampire! It was the middle of the afternoon, so I figured I’d kill some time at the Butterfly Gardens until the sun went down. As soon as I arrive what do I spot smoking in the sunlight? A Vampire! This was another disappointment. I was hoping being a Vampire would have serious benefits and serious obstacles! Sure you get all smokey and a bit grumpy sun-tanning as a Vamp, but I wanted it to be a challenge if you needed to get around during the day, like avoiding the streets, staying in the Subway, getting a special car with tinted windows, but that’s not the case at all. When I discovered this, becoming a Vampire got pushed to the bottom of my Late Night to do list.

Instead of flirting my way into life after death, I decided to become a Super Star. I had maximum level Martial Arts and Handiness from a few vacations, so I impressed celebrities by talking about those. You can’t do anything socially with a celebrity Sim until you impress them, but it wasn’t a challenge. I could impress 5 Star Sims later on with a different Sim character who only had a handiness level of 2 and a mixology level of 6.

Once my Sim started conversing with celebrities, I too became a celebrity. There were celebrity related opportunities fairly often, so by completing those and chatting up as many celebrities as I could manage, I was a Super Star by the end of the day. I wish it had been a little more difficult, as that is the main part of the expansion, and it only took a few hours to finish, lol. I also didn’t like how much your scandals effect your relationships! I ended up being enemies with over half the city because my Sim was a bit of a floozy. . . Lol, those damn paparazzi managed to catch me every time I did anything slightly less than savory, and then almost everyone I knew would suddenly stop being my friend. There was a social option to “Dispel Rumors”, but to go to each of my 30 odd friends every time I had a bit of Whoohoo in an elevator was just way too much trouble! There is an option to “Sue for Slander” by clicking on City Hall, but that didn’t help my relationships, it just made me 5,000 simoleans.

The main bonus about being a celebrity is all the free stuff you get. Depending on how many stars your Sim is, you will get a gift in the mail around the end of every week. My Sim ended up with 4 of the most expensive car, 3 pianos, 2 special guitars, 4 hot tubs, 3 fish windows, and a bunch of other random stuff. You end up making more simoleans selling all the free stuff than if your Sim had a job, lol.

After I’d finished becoming a Super Star, I figured it was time to open my very own Vampire Bar! I wanted to build one similar to Plasma, but I couldn’t place anymore skyscrapers in the city, and I didn’t want to demolish one of the existing bars in case the one I made was horrible. Instead I bought a lot just outside of town and built “Beyond The Rave” (get it, like beyond the grave, but with rave because it’s a club, lol). I’m actually pretty happy with my little underground bar, and it has been a “hot spot” for quite some time! I’d like my bar even more if my game hadn’t somehow glitched, causing every bouncer and bartender to disappear. They are there, but they are invisible? I don’t know how to fix it without just starting a new game, which is pretty lame!

Because I owned my own bar, I thought it was time to form a band of the same name and play some shows to help bring in the Vamps! I formed the band with my 5 Star Celebrity husband, who just so happened to be a pro with a guitar. My Sim played the piano. Apparently once you form a band, you will get phone calls with opportunities to play at different venues. I watched really close, but I never got one of those calls. I lost interest in the band thing pretty quick, you can’t set band uniforms and without any opportunities coming up, it seemed pretty fail.

Finally, it was time to become a Vampire! I started a new Sim and sent her off to the big city in search of some fangs. I met an old lady Vampire first with purple hair, and after becoming friends she agreed to turn me. She bit me on the wrist, said something about eternal slumber, and went on her jolly way. I went home and started working on Mixology (bar tending), because I thought it would be pretty cool to be a Vampire Bar Tender. It took a few days of walking around with itchy bite marks, but then just as I was sitting down to eat a nice bowl of cereal on the couch, I disappeared into a bit cloud of red smoke and bats, and emerged a Vampire. I threw that cereal in the trash, and headed out to find my first victim.

As a vampire you can click on a lot and select “Hunt”. I’m not sure how you choose your pray, but their portrait in your friends tab will have a bunch of swirls behind it so you know who you’ve chosen. As a Vampire you have two special powers. You can “Read Sims Mind” which lets you learn one trait, their sign, or one of their favorites. The second Vampire power is to “Make Sim Think of Me”, which sounds cool, but I have no idea what it does. It doesn’t appear to give you a boost to their friendship level or make social interactions any easier with that character. My final disappointment in Late Night was finding out that you don’t even need to drink from other Sims to survive as a Vampire. Every fridge is stocked with “Plasma Juice”, which is a little red juice box that a Vampire can happily live on without ever having to go hunting.

It’s just so sad. There’s so much Vampire stuff out there that the Sims could have drawn from to make the Late Night Vampires epic, but as it is they barely vary from normal Sims. You don’t even need to sleep in a coffin for goodness sake!

Something they did put some work into though, increasing Sims breast size! You can now choose how big you want your Simboobies to be, along with muscle size and muscle definition. They also added some very un-Sim-like lingerie with garters and stockings and the whole bit! They may not have been very inventive with this expansion, but Sims do seem to be getting sexier! lol.